Cross Functional Teams

Development teams are a lot like a church congregation.

A congregation is a community of people with special skills and jobs. You have pastors, preachers, choir directors, ushers, worship leaders, organists, etc.

It takes everyone working together doing their special jobs to make a worship service happen.

Development teams are also a community of people with special skills and jobs. You’ve got developers that specialize on certain parts of the stack, people who do different types of testing, people who have specialties in breaking down and managing the work of developing software, etc., etc., etc.

Alcohol and Christianity: A Response

As those familiar with my story already know, I was raised Mormon. For the first twenty-five or so years of my life, I believed a prophet of God had commanded his people to not drink alcohol, coffee, or tea. — This commandment is called the Word of Wisdom in Mormonism. — Further, because of how heavily the Word of Wisdom is taught to children and teenagers in the LDS Church, my worldview placed drinking alcohol or coffee as a sign of rebellion against God and a very bad sin.

LectServe: An Online Lectionary

Back in late February of this year the Liturgy and Common Worship Task Force of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) released an initial version of a lectionary for the upcoming ACNA Book of Common Prayer (BCP). As an Anglican seminarian, I was, naturally, very intrigued by the new lectionary. Though my parish doesn’t — yet? — use the new lectionary, looking at the PDF document released by the Task Force made me immediately clear that anyone wanting to use the new lectionary would need something more. For the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) there are several sites online and numerous applications to assist people with finding the readings for a given day. I knew people would want something similar for the ACNA lectionary.

Bring us Back and Renew our Lives

Shepherd of Israel, listen, you who lead Joseph like a flock; enthroned on the cherubs, shine on Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh; rouse your strength, come to us and save us! Yahweh Sabaoth, bring us back, let your face smile on us and we shall be safe. Yahweh Sabaoth, how much longer will you smoulder at your people’s prayer? Having fed us on the bread of tears, having made us drink them in such measure, you now let our neighbours quarrel over us and our enemies deride us. Yahweh Sabaoth, bring us back, let your face smile on us and we shall be safe. There was a vine? you uprooted it from Egypt; to plant it, you drove out other nations, you cleared a space where it could grow, it took root and filled the whole country. It covered the mountains with its shade, the cedars of God with its branches, its tendrils extended to the sea, its offshoots all the way to the river. Why have you destroyed its fences? Now anyone can go and steal its grapes, the forest boar can ravage it and wild animals eat it. Please, Yahweh Sabaoth, relent! Look down from heaven, look at this vine, visit it, protect what your own right hand has planted. They threw it on the fire like dung, but one look of reproof from you and they will be doomed. May your hand protect the man at your right, the son of man who has been authorised by you. We shall never turn from you again; our life renewed, we shall invoke your name, Yahweh Sabaoth, bring us back, let your face smile on us and we shall be safe. (Psalm 80, Jerusalem Bible)

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Posted: Sun, Dec 18, 2016, Words: ~1700, Reading Time: 8 min

Tags: #psalm #psalm 80 #advent #introspection #Jesus #lament

My iOS Home Screen Review

Towards the end of episode 95 of Analog(ue) Casey and Myke give each other’s iOS home screens a review. In that spirit, I thought it would be fun to go through the icons on my home screen giving an explanation for each one.

Home Screen

iOS Stock Clock

Honestly, I’m not entirely certain why this is still here. Prior to getting my beloved Pebble Time my phone was my alarm clock so this app was critical to my daily life. For the last year and a half, however, I’ve only used it a handful of times when I’ve forgotten to charge my watch. Todo: Replace this prime spot with something else.

The Aim of Christian Understanding: Engaged

In chapter two of The Formation of Christian Understanding Charles Wood takes on the task of defining exactly what the goal of Christian interpretation of the Bible should be. At the core of Wood’s understanding is a hermeneutical approach centered around a God who actively seeks deep relationship with his creation and a community of believers doing theology together. Though I see need to nuance some of Wood’s main points, his goal of focusing Christian interpretation of Scripture around coming to better know God and applying this knowledge as a theological collective are affirmed by Anglican doctrinal standards and more than applicable to the daily lives of Christians within the Anglican Communion. Wood does theology from within the Methodist tradition. Though I am Anglican, I too, pull from the Wesleyan tradition as I do theology. As the progenitor of the Methodist movements, Wesleyan theology — at its core bounds — fits neatly within the broad theological tent that is Anglicanism. Affirming the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, and the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1888 among other doctrinal standards, I can also pull from the theological thoughts of Wesleyan theologians. As I look at chapter two of Wood’s Formation I will pull from my Anglican standards of doctrine and Wesleyan-Anglican theology to show where my community agrees with Wood’s direction and where we offer critique or different insights.

Against Idols, Jesus is Lord

"I am the Lord your God, […] you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them […]" Exodus 20:2-5a ESV

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States' federal government has already caused many millions of words to be written in blogs, Tweets, postings, newspapers, texts, and all the various other means of communication of our modern world. I'm hesitant to add my words to the fray, but I've observed things over the last several days that I feel must be spoken to.

Nostalgic Heresies

My post-Mormon experience has been much easier than most. My transition out of the Mormon faith and into orthodox Christianity, unlike many, saw no family conflict and no lost relationships. By God’s immeasurable grace, I left the Mormon church with no external negative consequences to speak of.

My status as a post-Mormon has been a personal struggle of healing and theological recentering. Though less frequent in the last while, I am still hit with moments where I realize my otherness in a Christian context. There are still to this day times where the guilt and worthlessness of my Mormon youth come to the forefront. God, however, is always merciful and continually heals my wounds. In so many ways he has used my past as a benefit to my Christian ministry. My Mormon background has allowed me to see the church and the faith as an outsider. It has helped me better explain and proclaim the gospel because I can see things someone with only a Christian past to draw from cannot.

Vanderbilt Divinity has Changed Me

This semester marks the beginning of my third year at Vanderbilt Divinity School. It also marks a return to a required MDiv course after two semesters of Ph.D. level seminars. As I am once again confronted with future social organizers, ministers, and other religious leaders who seem to default to contrarian heterodoxy I have found myself taking a step back to reflect on where I’m at theologically. Has Vanderbilt Divinity changed me and — as this is most likely true — has it changed me for the better?

Web Proxy for Retro Computing

The move to TLS-secured websites is great for privacy and a good step forward for the Internet. That being said, as someone who collects and uses retro computing technology, this poses a problem; TLS-secured website will not work in older browsers. Further, heavy use of Javascript, larger image sizes, etc. make loading even none TLS-secured websites problematic. —When you’ve got megahertz and megabytes to work with rather than giga or tera, large payloads take forever!—

Audio in Windows 98SE on Parallels 12

— An updated post for for Parallels 13 & 14 can be found here. —

When I was in middle school there were four games that consumed the vast majority of my time: Simcity 2000, The Sims, Sim Theme Park, and Spiderman Cartoon Maker. I loved these games and would play them with my brothers nearly every day.

Adulthood means limited free time and, in my experience, a desire to in some way escape back to childhood via nostalgia. For me this manifest in my upkeep of old computers and software so I can play the games of childhood. Beyond that, I want to play the games of my childhood on hardware that I could hardly conceive of playing on back then. We’re talking maximum settings all around.

2005 Nissan Altima for Sale

Only $3,333.00!

2005 Nissan Altima 2.5 SL

168,000 Miles

Experience the smooth ride and easy driving of the third generation Nissan Altima in this unique lightly-owned car. 2005 was a facelift year for the Altima with a new grill and an updated rear, so there’s already a lot to like. This car, however, isn’t just any Altima. This burgundy red Altima includes the SL luxury package and has spent the last decade being driven by a librarian.

Review: Microsoft Foldable Universal Keyboard

Two years ago I first entered the world of iPad note taking. I was starting my first semester at VDS and had purchased a first generation iPad Air a few months before. My intent was to use my iPad to take notes during lectures and in my many meetings at work. — I was still rocking a giant, heavy HP Elitebook 8760w 17" portable workstation at the office. — I started down the path of pen input, but quickly realized that wasn’t the best way to go. Pen input wasn’t supported well by iOS and wasn’t automatically converted to plain-text like my beloved Newton would. For plain-text note taking, keyboard entry was still the best. I went to Amazon, purchased a bluetooth keyboard, and started carrying my iPad to meetings at work and lectures at school.

No Estimates: Project Management without Guessing

I have long been a skeptic of Agile^TM. There is no doubt that team-based, flexible, and product/value-focused software development is the best way we’ve discovered so far to build great, useful software. That, I believe, is fairly established even in the most corporate of environments. What I remain skeptical of is “methodologies” and processes which claim to “govern” and “better manage” the agile software development team and process. In my career I’ve found most of these techniques to serve MBAs’ and project managers’ need to track and quantify rather than to serve the team or improve the craft or quality of software. On the contrary, many Agile^TM methodologies I’ve experienced over the years have slowed the development process, hurt developer moral, and led to software that was behind schedule and didn’t provide the full value needed.

The Alliance: Honesty in the IT Community

Having recently left one employer for another, the topic of talent retention is fresh on my mind. When I started my new job at LifeWay the director over my department asked me to read The Alliance by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and and Chris Yeh. At first glance The Alliance looked like the typical IT management book. At only about 150 pages with a largish font and a trendy cover, my expectations where not high. Luckily, however, I was surprised by what I found inside. It is not a weighty book. It doesn’t go super deep. It does waste a lot of paper and ink – especially the later chapters. But, even though the content of this book would make a better blog post than a full publication, The Alliance makes some important points and gives useful guidance for the contemporary IT leader.